For Lenovo and Motorola, a Longtime Love Story

Lenovo Group Ltd. agreed on Wednesday in the U.S. to buy the Motorola handset business from Google Inc. for $2.91 billion. But according to Lenovo Chairman and Chief Executive Yang Yuanqing, it isn’t the first time the Chinese computer maker has taken a gander at the business.

Mr. Yang said when Motorola first split its mobile business from the rest of the company in 2011, he and Lenovo’s CFO went to Chicago to meet with that company’s executives. “Unfortunately we met with the wrong person,” he said, saying they met with the co-CEO of the systems business, not the handset business.

After Google acquired the handset business, Mr. Yang invited Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt to his house for dinner. “I told him if they really want to run a hardware business, they could keep it. If they are not interested in the hardware business, they could sell Motorola to us,” he said.

But he said just before this past Thanksgiving, Mr. Schmidt called him to ask if he was still interested in Motorola, “and I said yes.”